Customer Reviews

4.5A Good RTS game.

Advice: If you can get this game on the cheap i.e 1/3 the cost of a normal game, then buy it. if not. Look else where.

Having played the old games i can say that this keeps honest to the orginal, both in terms of story and gameplay.

The Graphics: Could have been made a little better by making the game more 3 dimentional (more than it already is), thus alowing buildings to that look taller and bigger. Also i would argue that the scaling of things could have been done better. Buildings being bigger mainly, thus making units look smaller. Increased camera controls on the zoom and pitch woulda been nice also. Most of the structures in the game have kept the same shape, though with tweeks to make them look alot better.

Sound/Music: No complaints, uprated versions of the old. Tbh if you dont like the music in the game, then u couldnt have liked the orginals music ether, i personal think its suits it.

The Package: Blizzard has taken a RTS which used to have 3 campaigns (like most RTS) and split it into 3 seperate games each costing the same as one whole game. This obviosly is a marketing stunt one which i personal will not fall for.You get the feel as you play the game that it has been unneccerilly fleshed out, with both HD and SD movies, loads of cutscenes(for a RTS) both HQ CG and Game quality, achievments, challenges, things that dont make a RTS, merely compliment it. Stuffing so much of this into a RTS which only spans about 26 missions is rediculous. For me, due to blizzards actions over the past years, they have lost ALL credability.

The Game itself in terms of quality i would say is 4/5

The Game taking into account content quantity and Blizzard, is 1.5/5 a fair score, its 1/3 of a game.

Advice: If you can get this game on the cheap i.e 1/3 the cost of a normal game, then buy it. if not. Look else where.

4.5Great. But...

Great game. But as many of the other reviews have pointed out its in 3 parts so you cant help but feel ripped off at having to buy 2 more games if you ewant to get the full experience. I have loved all the blizzard titles to date but am disappointed at the level of indifference they show to customers during difficult times.

4.5Game is great.

Game is great. If you wan't to see it is full potential you can watch the major leagues of SC2 that are played all around the world. (Nasl, GSL, MLG). I'm not very good at it but I'm amazed by how top tier players use every single missclick of their opponent to win the game. :)

4.5This game has earned 5 out of 5

This game continues a very good storyline, improves on the graphics and gameplay and has the support of Blizzard and a very dedicated community. The only thing I find confusing are the negative reviews which are either providing false information (yes you can mutate air units) or down to personal ability and not the game itself (I'm fairly bad at the league stuff too). If you like RTS you should like this. If Blizzard do release more of this then I for one would buy them just as I would any sequel to a game I enjoy.

4.5They've removed more than you gain

I can't comment on single player, we always played over LAN (I wont bore you with low opinion of no LAN option).

The game feels like Starcraft without the Broodwar expansion added to it. Units types feel limited and linear.

A lot of the abilities have been removed like Red Archon Maestorm and Mind Control (no great loss), no scouts or basic aircraft for protos, Zerg Red Acid and Dark Swarm, No Zerg evolution of aircraft at all, No Arbitor unit full stop (mothership has similar abilities, but limited to one). No Hydalisks evolution to the underground spikey version, which combined with the now hopeless Zerg turrets mean that Zerg get pummeled every time we've played. The protos have lost so much as well.

The only strategy seems to be brute force now, and we've found the humans simply walk through the other 2 teams without problem Small groups of armoured humans in a mixed formation seem to walk through most situations. They also haven't fixed the AI pathfinding problem from the original, where a human places Supply Depots at the entrance to a cliff and the units attacking line up to be slaughtered or wander round the map - in fact they've made it worse, cos Supply depots can now lower to act as a gate, giving the humans no problem being blocked in.

Skirmish is laughable against computer, as should you build up even a small army, you will walk through most AI levels and the Insane doesn't give you a chance to start the game, let alone build a base.

Buildings also collapse so quickly, it now reminds me more of C&C Red Alert and C&C 3 Tiberium wars.

There are some clever new additions, but the game feels very limited and I think it's been completely over-hyped (and I've been playing the original over LAN since it came out all those years ago). If this didn't have the Starcraft badge on it, I say the reviews would have been less favourable.

Graphics - Humans and Zerg are nice looking, but the protos look cell shaded and not very futuristic - it doesn't suit the style of graphics used on the other 2 teams (my machine has everything set to ultra).

The Specs required are at least quite low. I have an AMD x2 6000+ with cheap 9800GT graphics card and everything can be set to Ultra. By modern standards that spec is nothing special. Supreme Commander 1 seems to struggle a little with big maps on the same spec.

4.5Truly excellent

Way back in 1998 a friend of mine introduced me to a genre of gaming known as Real Time Strategy via a game called Starcraft- and I have been hooked ever since.Afterwards I played all sorts of RTS games, from Emperor: Battle for Dune and Tiberian Sun through to Warcraft 3 and Dawn of War. I have been patiently (or not so patiently!) awaiting SC2 for a loooong time now, and thankfully I have not been dissappointed.

First off, Blizzard have learned their mistake when they did Warcraft 3. Their follow up changed too many aspects of the gameplay and, although the game was good, it was criticised (and did worse than it should have) because it changed too many of the key aspects of play. This mistake has not been repeated!

Gameplay on SC2 is almost identical to SC, only making minor tweaks to controls and the like based on what has shown to have worked well in other games. For instance the control groups can now be larger, and have an additional method of creating them- but the old way of creating them has remained.

Some have complained that Wings of Liberty is 'only a 3rd of a game'. This is simply not true. The game has a total of 26 missions and a hidden one, 27 playable missions in total- with a greater deal of replayability than SC1 due to such things as achievements and an additional difficulty level of 'Brutal'. As any mission can be replayed at any time at any difficulty setting, this gives almost the same number of missions and greater replayability than the original game. Particularly when one takes account of the fact that in the original the first couple of missions for the 2nd and 3rd chapters were 'familiarisation' missions to accuant you with the way the new race you were playing operate.Effectively the 2 planned expansions could be simply considered as SC3 and 4, just with a much shorter gap to their release since the last Starcraft chapter came out over a decade ago!

A legitimate complaint though is that there is no LAN support, which is becoming increasingly true of all PC game producers.Why several computers all running through the same router are only allowed to play together via a server hundreds of miles away rather than just using the buiilt in capabilities of any modern router is beyond me, but hopefully popular opinion will lead to a change of this via a patch. The South Korean market will almost certainly lead to this changing in the not too distant- but don't simply wait around for other people to sort this out. If you too find this a nuisance, start writing to every game developer every time they do this in a game. Simply moaning about it will achieve nothing!

Overall I highly recommend this game. It's not quite perfect, due mainly to adopting some of the bad conventions that other online games have been instigating over the past few years rather than choosing to simply ignore them, but it is very close!

4.5Very good. Very good indeed...

First off - the original StarCraft. I didn't like it, didn't 'get' all the hype surrounding it and constantly ignored request from my cousin to join him online with it. :P

What I found with the original game (despite the seemingly worldwide euphoria for it) was a rather bland, RTS Grind Game that simply centred upon on who could churn out the most units quicker and swamp the opposition in due course.

So I left the original game, on the shelf and gathering dust. On a whim, I thought I'd get StarCraft 2 - thinking that they should have moved the genre on somewhat since 1998 and the original games' release. And how glad I was that I did that.

Put simply, the production values of SC2 are superb. I'm not quite sure if naujok was playing the same game (?) as the names on the credits as the end scroll for several minutes. I think I have only seen Mass Effect 2 have a similar amount of staff working on one title. You can definitely tell that all the individual parts to the game have been crafted well and combine to make for a great RTS experience. Little additions like the Arnie-style voice of the Thor pilot and even the Thor walker itself being folded up to be transported by the air units shows some of the detail added to the game.

The single player campaign itself is a brilliant and varied selection of 25 missions (26 if you manage to unlock the Secret Mission) - most with diffierent objectives and goals to complete. There are usually bonus missions within the main mission itself that obviously are down to the player to choose whether or not to pursue. Key to these bonus missions are the chance to recover either Zerg or Protoss research items which can then be utilised to help and improve your units on future missions.

As for an RTS style? SC2 is much more like Command & Conquer of old, rather than the likes of Company of Heroes. There is the distinct rock-scissors-paper method of utilising units - some being exceptional at ground attack, but totally open to attack from the air. And vice versa.

The story does progress well indeed - certainly well enough that once I completed it, I was looking forward to the release of the future expansions.

Despite all that, it doesn't take top slot for my favoutite RTS. Company of Heroes still retains that title and I suspect that for me anyway, it will take something VERY special indeed to budge it from its throne. However, StarCraft is a superb RTS in its own right and if like me, you didn't like (or play) the original - don't let that put you off this time around.

4.5Overhyped

I am only interested in the single player campaign.Graphics are really dated looking, effects are lame, buildings still have square footprint and can only be placed in one direction. Music during missions so bad and inappropriate it got switched off immediately. Story doesn't get well explained, cut scenes bore me, characters leave me unemotional towards them. Two stars only because for some reason I yet felt compelled to complete the campaign. That must mean something.

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